Zine-era ideals recur unchanged in social media discourse but lost their political charge
Evidence
Notably, many claims about zines—small, in de pen dent, self-expressive, user-created, alternatives to Big Media—are identical to those made about YouTube videos and blogs. Also notable is the strong political ethos that Duncombe highlights. While some zine writers overtly write about politics, the process of writing and distributing a zine itself requires certain elements that palpably reject corporate capitalism, like “borrowing” photocopies and computer time from an employer, corresponding with like-minded zinesters and fans through the mail, and utilizing a barter system. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 83
Categorization
- XREF: Flags the rhetorical continuity between zines and web 2.0 that the book investigates as its central stake — the political ethos present in zine practice vs its absence on social platforms. — connects to: Self-published zine culture explicitly rejected corporate capitalism and consumerism — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 82; Web 2.0 adopted DIY individualism while abandoning zine culture’s anti-capitalist and feminist critique — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 98; Social media’s inward self-focus co-opts radical politics into personal reform — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 724 (+7 more)
- QUESTION: Worth pressing: exactly when and why did the DIY ‘make your own culture’ ethic drop out of self-publication discourse as it moved to platforms premised on advertising and extraction?
Broader Connections
- Web 2.0 adopted DIY individualism while abandoning zine culture’s anti-capitalist and feminist critique
#corroborates(0.98) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 98 - DIY webzine ethics were absorbed into Web 2.0 stripped of their politics
#corroborates(0.98) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 96 - Web 2.0 inherited DIY culture while stripping its radical politics.
#corroborates(0.98) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 96 - Social media’s inward self-focus co-opts radical politics into personal reform
#complicates(0.80) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 724 - Early web publishers saw zines as resistance to corporate homogenization
#expands(0.78) - The shift to subjectivity-based politics relocated rather than abandoned the political
#contradicts(0.75) — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 996 - Major social platforms degenerated into engagement-driven imitation lacking distinct culture.
#expands(0.72) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 702